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Monthly Archives: June 2014

The major additions for this release are support for the Imaging Source USB cameras on OSX and for IEEE1394/IIDC/DCAM cameras on both Linux and OSX. The latter group includes the Point Grey Firefly MV which I have tested (in mono) and also the Point Grey Chameleon and Atik GP which I have not tested. It may well be that all sorts of FireWire cameras also work, but I have none to test and a little fiddling may be required with permissions to get things going. As it is there’s a udev rules file for these cameras on Linux to make the devices readable and writable.

That seems to be one short paragraph that covers an awful lot of work…

Other changes include the addition of controls to enable/disable auto mode for gain and exposure.

My DMK21.618 claims it can do 60fps, but fails miserably with broken frames. That may be a firmware issue, but 30fps seems to work fine.

The same caveats apply for OSX as with the 0.0.6 release. ASI120 cameras may need a firmware change to work, and if you’re building from source it may help to know that I used macports for my build and in particular the qt4-mac, yasm, pkgconfig and tiff packages.

There are some bugfixes for handling of cameras in this release. These mainly relate to exposure times, but there are small improvements for all of the supported cameras.

The major changes however are restructuring the code to integrate with GNU autotools for building and support for OSX. I can only test cameras on Mavericks, but I believe the binaries should work on 64-bit Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion. The cameras currently supported are the ZWO ASI range, the QHY5 and the QHY5L-II. The USB2 versions of the ASI120 require a firmware change to work with USB on some (perhaps all) Mac hardware. The firmware and uploader (which I believe only works on Windows at the moment) are available from the ZWO website.

If you’re attempting to build the sources on OSX then it may help to know that I used macports fairly heavily and in particular the packages qt4-mac, yasm, pkgconfig and tiff are required.

Plans for the next release are a little vague at the moment. I’ve had a request to add support for one of the Point Grey cameras and as they do provide an SDK that’s definitely under consideration if I can get my head around it in time. Making the Imaging Source cameras work on OSX is possible (I already have the camera library recognising that a TIS camera is present). I didn’t make a start on filter wheel support for 0.0.6 and I really would like to get somewhere with that for the next release too.